 Victor M. 11th - South Africa
We're strangers in each other's eyes, with multiple versions of ourselves existing in every mind. To some, I'm loud and vibrant, while others see me as quiet and reserved. Perspectives clash, yet all are true, reflecting fragments of my being. But who am I, really? The truth lies within. I'm not one person, but many - a mosaic of moments, emotions, and thoughts. Others see shining glimpses, but only I hold the full, intricate light. My identity is a kaleidoscope of selves, forever evolving. In this tapestry of human sight, lies the beauty of complex, multifaceted existence.  Evvi, 12th - France
you stitched me from the prettiest pieces, only the ones you wanted to see-- the way I laugh when I’m tired, the softness in my apologies, the parts of me that looked easy to love. you never saw the jagged hours, the shaking hands, the dark corners I didn’t know how to light. you built a girl out of daydreams and asked her to be me. I stayed still for you. folded into shapes you liked. shrunk myself quieter, prettier, more patient, less real-- until even I forgot what I sounded like. you loved the paper doll you made. you never asked if I was bleeding under the seams.  E Spellman, 12th - Oakland, CA
For years, all I wanted was a baby sister. I’d heard somewhere as a child that if you looked at a star and clenched your eyes shut while thinking about something you wished for, it would come true. So every star became a wish for a baby sister. When Chanukah came around, I had the clever and endearing idea to erase every single item from my wish list and replace it with one thing: Baby Sister. Mama rubbed my back knowingly, with a quiet sadness I couldn’t understand back then. “I know, love. I know you want that,” she said, tracing soft circles on my back. Then came the yard sale, on a foggy afternoon. I sat on the porch, my long legs swinging off the top step. The air smelled like cardboard and old plastic boxes. I saw piles of old jeans, forgotten toys, things that hadn’t mattered in years. A woman with short black hair sifted through a box of sweaters. Her toddler son was toddling across our lawn, crumbs stuck to his mouth. She held up a red sweater. A maternity sweater with a gaping looseness in the belly. PREGNANCY, the box read. The box that had been tucked away, half used, in the basement. “This is too cute for Christmas when I’m pregnant again!” she said to another woman beside her, laughing. I stared at the red sweater for a long time. I knew then — Mama wasn’t going to be pregnant again. I felt something inside me drop, slow and heavy. It felt like a dream had died in that moment — like I stepped into something heavy, something I wasn’t ready to feel. I didn’t cry or say anything. I just watched the woman, her little son, and felt my dream shift from my reality and into the little boy’s. The memory etched itself into me. Even now, years later, I can still close my eyes and see that red sweater in the black-haired woman’s hands. The way the material hung loose at the middle. The weight of the realization that I wouldn’t ever get a baby sister - no matter how many stars I wished on. That realization lived in me. I carried it with me before I could even process what it meant or why I remembered that moment so well. I’m sixteen now. I’m in a striped tank top and old jeans, crouched on the bed of my new room in Mexico, wet hair dripping onto the bedspread. Everything feels different and unfamiliar, with a rhythm separate from the one I was used to. The separation made me look back at my life, my childhood, my memories from a wider lens. And the sweater moment came back to me. The dream that slipped quietly from my world into someone else’s. And I felt the feeling fully, consuming me like a cloud I couldn’t escape. It was rooted so deeply in me that feeling it again shifted something in my whole being. I cried big, full tears splashing onto the sheets. I leaned over a white spiral notebook and let it spill out, pressing my pen hard into the page as tear drops blurred my fresh sentences. Mama wasn’t there to trace circles on my back. I was grown now. I had to wipe my own tears, to tuck my own hair behind my ears. I know everything happens for a reason. But I don’t know why God thought I could hold this, my mind echoed. I closed my eyes and let the tears sting my cheeks. This is it. So I have to come to terms with it. There had been a spit sample I sent to a lab when I was in middle school — something I’d completely forgotten about. And then one random night in high school, I checked my DNA test account out of curiosity. And I got the notification that I had a sister. A sister. All that time since the red sweater — she had existed. She was real. With my same hair. Same eyebrows. Living in another city. All those stars I’d wished on as a kid - I was wishing for someone who already existed.  Daniel, 11th - New York, NY
The water flowed over my face as I opened my eyes. I looked up and saw the great river roar over me as though I was a rock in a stream. The sun's beautiful rays fanned out around me like a many-armed angel. I felt the currents drag at my clothes. They seemed to whisper to me, “Come down Nathan, down into the depths.” I shivered, What's going on here I thought. The water felt more insistent now: “Come down Nathan,” it said again. Just then, a leaf dropped onto the river. I watched as it landed above me, sending ripples across the water. It flowed down the stream gently rocking from side to side. Such a nice leaf I thought. “Be like the leaf, Nathan. Come to us.” The voice seemed to emanate from everywhere– “What is this? Why am I underwater and who the f*** is Nathan?” I pushed up from the river bed, but it was as if it didn't want to let me go. “Stay Nathan,” it whispered into my ear. “My name’s not Nathan,” I screamed, trying to rip myself free from the silt. “No, stay with us Nathan, stay and be one.” I am not dying to some creepy river voice, I thought, as the silt started closing over me like a coffin. “Come join us,” the voice said as if slithering into my ear. It was getting hard to think now. NO NO NO I wanted to say, but it was like my mouth was sewn shut by a million little needles. The water pressed down on me, the pressure feeling like I was trying to move a mountain: “Yes Nathan, come down.” The silt closed over my head and the world went black as I was dragged into the dark abyss. “Thank you, Nathan.”  Crow, 12th- Oakland, CA
I don’t dream of growing old But I do dream of a kitchen That is all mine It will have cracking linoleum floors An oven that moves in the night of old age And a rumbling fridge And I will feel the sunlight when it is cold I will totter through the cramped room in my underwear Because it is all mine The assortment of spices The pot and the pan And the teapot All observe my life move on The refrigerator will make indents in the floor From the weight of memories  Evvi, 12th - France
You put your hands inside my ribs and didn’t flinch. You found the parts others left cracked and bruised, those who turned away at the sight of the damage, yet you held them steady, never asking for explanations, never demanding to know who left me in ruin, you simply gathered the fragments and shaped them into something whole. Your fingers traced scars no one else saw, or cared to acknowledge, and somehow you knew how to heal wounds you didn’t create, how to stitch up what others tore open while digging for answers to questions I didn't even know existed. You never forced me to answer why my heart stumbled, why my chest felt like a war zone, or why everyone left when they saw blood. You just knelt in the wreckage, dug deep into the wounds, to the places that bled too long and held onto me. You didn’t flinch when the weight of me was too much, when my heart pounded, aching in your hands. you only pressed closer, silently bearing what was never yours to carry. You put your hands inside my ribs and didn’t flinch, whispering “I’ll love you even when it feels like no one else does.”  Caroline, 11th - Menlo Park, CA
Although the United States Constitution includes a right to free speech, free religion, and various human rights, citizens lack a Constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. During the late 1960’s, the United States experienced an environmental crisis, which placed pressure on government legislators and climate activists to better protect the environment. In the following decade, the U.S. passed many major environmental statutes, nearly all of which drew Congressional authority from Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, commonly known as the commerce clause. This clause states that “The Congress shall have Power…to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” By leveraging the commerce clause, the U.S. government has passed major environmental statutes. However, Supreme Court rulings have limited the scope of the commerce clause, leading environmental activists to urge the United States to adopt a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a clean and healthy environment, protecting human safety as climate change’s civilian impacts grow increasingly dire. Despite the lack of an explicit right to a clean and healthy environment, United States legislators have used the Federal power granted by the interstate commerce clause to pass environmental legislation since the 1970s. Molly Weiner, a research assistant at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, asserted that “the Commerce Clause has been widely interpreted to allow the federal government to regulate interstate commerce…the federal government can regulate activities that negatively affect the environment and poorly affect interstate commerce.” Weiner argues that legislators have interpreted the commerce clause to give Congress the power to pass and regulate environmental initiatives. As Weiner writes, a “broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause” would provide authority to many major environmental statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, all of which allowed for sweeping environmental action. Notably, the 1972 Clean Air Act mandated that “Each State shall…adopt and submit to the Administrator…a plan which provides for implementation, maintenance, and enforcement of such primary standard in each air quality control region,” thereby holding states accountable for their environmental impact. The Clean Water Act set similar goals by recognizing that “it is the policy of the Congress to recognize, preserve, and protect the primary responsibilities and rights of States to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution.” This goal displays how the U.S. creates environmental legislation that heavily delegates the responsibility of climate action to individual state governments. However, the Environmental Protection Agency emphasized the importance of the national scope of both the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, writing that “the collective goal of US environmental policy is to protect the environment for future generations…Laws written by Congress provide the authority for EPA and the other Federal agencies to write regulations.” The EPA emphasized the importance of this U.S. environmental policy since it provided authority for regulations that hold individuals, corporations, and governments responsible for their environmental impact. These regulations are only made possible by Federal power granted by the interstate commerce clause. Although the commerce clause provides opportunity for environmental legislation, its impact has been limited by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the scope of the clause and the increasingly political nature of climate action. Supreme Court cases regarding the commerce clause have emphasized the importance of preventing overreaching Federal regulations. Historian Lydia B. Hoover argued in the 1997 William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review that “the Commerce Clause is worded clearly on its face, and the difficulty with its application comes with interpreting those words and also with the changing interpretation over the years.” Hoover suggested that the Supreme Court's interpretations of the applications of the commerce clause have limited its scope. Many Supreme Court rulings on the commerce clause concern the potential of an overly centralized federal government. For example, Molly Weiner wrote that West Virginia v. EPA “effectively neutered the ability of the federal government, particularly the EPA, to regulate environmental pollution, and gave a huge amount of this power instead to the states,” demonstrating the Court’s preference towards state oversight rather than federal power. Moreover, Christine A. Klein, Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, wrote in 2001, “The Court repeated its now-familiar concern that the judiciary should not tolerate ‘federal encroachment upon a traditional state power’… emphasizing the states' role in controlling water pollution.” The ruling in this Supreme Court case demonstrates how the Court limited the application of the interstate commerce clause to reduce federal power. This pattern continued in United States v. Morrison (2000), in which the Court limited the applications of the commerce clause, and emphasized that “The Constitution requires a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local.” In addition to Supreme Court commerce clause cases, increasing politicization surrounding climate action has decreased the effectiveness of the commerce clause and environmental legislation. Steve Cohen, professor at the Columbia Climate School, argued that legislation passed under the authority of the commerce clause have been less effective because they require “a partnership between the federal government and the states,” but conservative state governments “are not interested in partnering with the federal government.” Cohen argued how politics, in addition to Supreme Court interpretations of the commerce clause, limit the impact of environmental legislation. Due to the limited effectiveness of the commerce clause, environmental activists and some state governments proposed a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to a clean and healthy environment. In a White House press statement in 2015, former President Obama highlighted the commerce clauses’ flaws, claiming that “court decisions have led to uncertainty and a need for clarification.” Christine Klein echoed Obama’s concerns, writing that “Federal environmental laws might be rendered vulnerable to commerce clause challenges if the Court shifts its focus from the nature of regulated activities…virtually any federal law with noncommercial social or environmental goals could be invalidated under this logic.” Klein’s analysis revealed that the Court could further limit the commerce clause, rendering current environmental statutes less productive. Proposing an alternate solution, environmental activists urged the U.S. to adopt an amendment to the Constitution, known as a “Green Amendment,” which promised a Constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, thus heavily encouraging the United States to further prioritize the regulation of climate change and its impact on humans. Hawaii’s proposed Green Amendment guaranteed “all individuals the right to a clean and healthy environment and a stable climate.” Environmental activists argued that the United States should adopt a similar amendment, thus ensuring that climate change is a national priority. By leveraging the Congressional power granted by the commerce clause of the Constitution, the United States has passed major environmental statutes that aim to protect the environment. However, the impact of this legislation has been limited by both Supreme Court rulings and the increasing politicization of climate action. As climate change grows increasingly dire, environmental activists urge state governments and the Federal government to adopt a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to a clean and healthy environment.  Maetsebale, 11th - Soweto, South Africa
Riches within, riches without A slave can be richer, no doubt In love, laughter, and family ties True wealth lies, beyond financial guise Trust is gold, the glue that binds Relationships strong, hearts and minds Money's a servant, not a master's might Spend it wisely, day and night The best time to make friends is before you need Associate with those who help you succeed No man is free who's not master of his soul Wealth is not his who doesn't make it whole Family is everything, love shines bright The master key to happiness, day and night Trust is more valuable than gold or fame Spend money, share love, and play the game  Tibsa, 10th - Berkley, MI
it’s weird to watch the two people you love the most completely separation it’s a slow fall that starts with one argument turns into a series of useless banters the elephant in the room, picking i’ve learned to ignore pretty well not my fault i’m always told but it’s present nevertheless weekly turns into daily my idea of love shifts what made it shatter actually, no what combination of things broke our lives into 2 pieces a downhill staircase. ______________________ “You can take a break” , my mom says “You can do hard things” , my dad says I'm stuck in the middle, like the pillows separating them.  Irene, 11th - San Jose, CA
In every dream, I watch you die in my hands. I always stand in third person, mute and still, unable to save you. I hold you while your body turns cold. *** Dear Little Sister, You were born blue. Choking on the water inside your lungs, you fought for your breath as you entered the world from the ocean of the womb. I want to say that you lived. And you did, for a while, long enough anyway to master the basics of swimming. You loved the ocean, the waves, but you had some strange obsession with dolphins: dolphin plushies, keychains, notebooks, documentaries. We even went to Seaworld twice to see the dolphin show. But merely watching soon wasn’t enough. Eventually, and inevitably, you wanted to swim with the dolphins. As we grew up, our parents expected more from us. This meant more rules, more restraints. “Finish all your food, study as much as possible, practice the flute, and be back before dinner.” You broke. You always refused the food Mom cooked, skipped the classes Dad enrolled you in. You quit the flute after two days, because you thought you were wasting your breath in producing a note that sounded identical to a seashell cupped to your ear. Although our parents obsessively checked my grades on the online platform, nobody cared if you came home with a report card filled with Cs, or if you didn’t return home after sunset. “We can’t control her anymore. I think we should let go,” I overheard through the barrier of the walls, Mom whispering to Dad. Although Mom didn’t expect you to eat the food at the dinner table anymore, she always spooned out rice into your bowl first and set it down where you were supposed to sit (but didn’t), causing your place at the table to grow warm for a while. The night you didn’t come home, I waited in front of your bowl of rice until my eyes began to stick together. I knew that you said you were hanging out with your friends, but I also knew they would already be in their homes by now. Just as the clock struck 10 PM, you slipped through the house through the gap you created during your halfhearted push. I didn’t ask. It was enough, at that moment, for me, that you were safe in the warmth of the house, protected from the wind blistering outside. That night in my dreams, you died in my arms for the first time. *** Here is the dream I’ll never tell you: In December, we sat on a bunk bed in Hawaii. You complained about shortness of breath. You told me not to tell Mom so you could go swim with the dolphins. I smiled and complied. I knew you had waited for this trip for a whole year. In March, while the grass grew greener, your face became paler. I asked you how you were feeling. You snapped at me, “I’m fine. Don’t you dare tell Mom and Dad.” I didn’t. I forced myself to believe that you were getting better, like you always had. But this time felt different, like cold seawater seeping down into my lungs, my body absorbing the salt through the pores on my skin until I began to feel nauseous. And just like that, you started to turn blue. While I was choking on brine, you choked on your very own breath. I froze in this fear, in this realization that you were dying. I simply could not accept that I would lose you. In the summer, we traveled to Korea. We ate food in the plaza smelling of scrubbed white tiles and plastic. You lay on my lap. Your body felt like fire, your breath shallow, like waves not strong enough to reach the shore. Mom and Dad were too busy eating to notice. Or maybe they were pretending everything was fine. I cried, “Save her! Please! Take her to the ambulance.” She’s dying. Those last words were the ones I could never say out loud. The words bit; I could not let them out of my mouth. I kept silent with salty tears streaming down my face. By then it was too late. You hung limp in my arms, your skin devoid of color. The fire extinguished, and your body morphed into an ashy stone. You were no longer blue. Then I woke up drowning, drenched in cold sweat, lungs churning seawater into seafoam, my heart thrashing so violently I thought it might leap from my chest into the abyss of night. I knew you were already gone. *** When I try to unravel the meaning behind this dream, I always wonder why you never wanted to tell our parents about your illness. Was it the blank hospital walls, being trapped in the too-small bed? It couldn’t have been because you thought we wouldn’t care. You knew we would. Maybe that was the reason. We would care too much, and you wanted us to let go. *** After the night, the night of the dream, I developed a new habit of checking your breath . I used to be a deep sleeper, but now I woke to the deafening silence of the room. I never dared touch your bed with all your dolphin plushies, but I ran my fingers right above your mouth and felt your breath becoming air. I listened for the sound of the ocean in your lungs. Your breath was shallow, turquoise waves drenching the shimmering sand. I could finally sleep in peace. In these silent ways, warming up your place at the table, waiting for you to come home, checking your breath before I slept, I hoped that I could still save you. I knew you had strayed too far out into the ocean, where we could not reach you with our calls. But we hoped, one day, the current would carry you home, where we always thought you belonged. Or maybe you might swim back of your own will. At Seaworld, I learned that dolphins have no natural habitat; they roam around the sea for their entire lives. I wonder if you are so different after all. I wonder if you will ever find home, even if your home isn't ours. *** The next winter, I watched your bowl of rice grow cold and harden. Nightfall greeted me with a raindrop. The drops fell onto the ground in an organized pattern, accelerating over time. When the leak in the ceiling dripped on your rice, I remembered. My mind flashed with your face, the color of the sea against the white tiles of the plaza. The heat escaped your body in an instant. If only I stopped you before, told our parents in that dream where you died, looked after you more. The rain reminded me of the ocean. I’m scared of the ocean. I dropped everything and ran to the market where you always went, feet halfway crammed into my sandy sneakers, soaking in the rain. The roar of the ocean plagued my ears; I felt smothered by the ocean’s cry. I thought that I’d be able to save you this time. It took twenty minutes to get there. I spotted you shivering in your t-shirt on the wet benches under the blue glow of the market lights. I wanted to ask why you were outside in the rain, but I didn’t. “I like the rain,” you grumbled at my soaked figure standing in front of you. We walked side by side, enough distance between us for a third person to squeeze through. Rain surged down on us in patterns, overflowing and swallowing the world in blue noise, followed by silence. We breathed in this silence. *** Dear Sister, I dreamt of you last night. We swam with the dolphins in Hawaii. I was cautious stepping into the cerulean water, but you had already become one with the dolphins. You shouted, “Come!” but I was scared of the ocean. I watched you, your eyes burning with a new kind of fire not even the water could quench. “Don’t go too far!” I shouted. Maybe you didn’t hear me. Maybe you chose not to listen. From the sand, I watched you swim away with them, slowly growing smaller and smaller, until you melted into the color of the sky. |